


I'll Take Care of You

by quicksilverdeancas (quicksilvermalec)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, BECAUSE IT IS SO IMPORTANT, CONSENT CONSENT CONSENT, Consent, Explicit Consent, Gabriel Angst, Gabriel Has Self-Worth Issues, Gabriel Loves Sam Winchester, Implied/Referenced Emotional/Psychological Abuse, M/M, No Sex, No Smut, Past Abuse, Sam Winchester Has a Crush on Gabriel, Sam Winchester Knows First Aid, Sam Winchester Loves Gabriel, Sam Winchester is A Supportive Friend, Supportive Sam Winchester, all the fucking angst, enjoy, mentions of abuse, quicksilver request
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-09-24 09:37:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20356336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quicksilvermalec/pseuds/quicksilverdeancas
Summary: “Thank you for doing all this for me,” Gabriel whispered without looking up at him. “I know that I’m not worth it and I can’t really give you anything back but I’m so, so grateful that you care about me. You’re about the only person who does.”orIn which Gabriel's family is absolute shit, and Sam wants to maybe make it better.





	I'll Take Care of You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RoseNymph](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseNymph/gifts).

> Thank you to RoseNymph for this prompt! I'm sorry it took so long to write, I wrote and rewrote it a thousand times, but it's done now, so enjoy!

Sam Winchester had many, many problems. And every single one of them, if you went back far enough, originated from and/or was related in some way to his best friend, Gabriel Novak.

But Sam Winchester’s many, many problems were nothing in comparison to Gabriel Novak’s many, many, _many_ problems. Sam knew Gabe had Some Shit in His Past™, and he didn’t like to pry because he didn’t want to make the blond uncomfortable or feel like he had to talk about something he didn’t want to. He knew a little bit about it because Gabe was, after all, his best friend, but some things he just wouldn’t talk about.

And, okay. Maybe Sam had a tiny crush on his friend. But he couldn’t really control it. Seriously, the guy’s funny, charismatic, sweet, and fucking adorable. Sam couldn’t be blamed for falling a little bit in love with him in the twelve years they’d known each other.

Gabriel had given Sam a key to his house, and Sam came over whenever he really felt like it. That day, he went over to his best friend’s house and the blond wasn’t standing in the entryway waiting to greet him. That was unusual but not unheard of – he probably just hadn’t seen Sam’s text.

But then he heard people shouting at each other upstairs. Startled, he sprinted toward the room the voices were emanating from.

“You are always like this! You never listen to me, to any of us, and then you just make decisions for us! We have no choice but to do what you want us to.”

“Father left-”

“You in charge, we know. You only mention it every goddamn day.”

“I am just trying, brother, to protect you.”

“I don’t need protection, Michael!”

“Luke, please listen to me. _Please_.”

That was when a voice that Sam recognized joined the two unfamiliar voices. “Stop, stop yelling! Sam’s going to be here any minute, please don’t let him see this.”

“Get out of the way, Gabriel,” the voice that had been called Luke sneered. “Do you think we care about your stupid little friend?”

“Lucifer, you should be kinder to your brothers.”

“You are _not_. My brothers,” Lucifer spat.

“Stop fighting!” Gabriel screamed. Nobody answered him, but Sam heard a sound that made him flinch in sympathy and horror – it sounded like the wet smack of flesh on flesh.

That was it. He pushed the door open and burst into the room. All three men stared at him. Gabriel was holding the side of his face, and his eyes were the widest. He looked as if he wanted Sam to leave and never come back.

Well, too bad, Sam thought. He pushed between ‘Michael’ and ‘Lucifer’ and knelt beside Gabriel. “Are you okay?” he asked. Gabriel nodded weakly, even though Sam could tell he was lying.

“You should leave,” Lucifer snapped at him.

“You should stay the fuck away from my best friend,” Sam shot back, words clipped.

“You’re not a part of this, Sam,” Gabriel murmured. “You don’t need to save me.”

“Yes I do,” Sam announced.

“You are not Gabriel’s family,” Michael told him. “You do not belong here.”

Sam gave him a hard, cold look. “I’m more his family than you’ll ever be.”

He took Gabriel’s arm and led him away from his elder brothers, out of the house and back to his older brother’s 1967 black Chevrolet Impala. “Shotgun?” he asked.

“Shotgun,” Gabriel replied, smiling a little.

Sam deposited his friend in the front passenger seat and walked around the front of the car to slide into his own seat. He smiled at Gabriel again before switching on the motor and driving over to his own house.

He led the shorter blond into his apartment and let him deposit himself on one of the couches. “What do you want right now?” he asked his friend.

Gabriel sighed. “Um… good food and a bath.”

“Okay. Do you want me to make you food slash help you bathe or just leave you alone? Cause I can do either. I’m here to help you.”

“I would love it if you’d make me some food,” Gabriel replied quietly, so Sam gave him a soft smile and set about making him hot dogs.

“Four too many?”

“No, that’s great, thanks,” Gabriel replied, still sounding subdued as he accepted the plate from his best friend and wolfed down his four hot dogs in ten minutes. When he was done, he dropped the plate onto the couch cushion and made to stand. He turned on his heel when he heard Sam’s gasp.

“What’s wrong, Samaroo?” he asked.

“You’re bleeding,” Sam murmured, extending a hand before pulling it back like he’d been burned. “I’m sorry. Can I help you with this or would you prefer that I let you handle it? I’m worried about you, is all, and I just want to make sure that you’re okay and not hurt and why are you bleeding? Didn’t he just hit you? That doesn’t make sense…” He trailed off, looking uncertain.

“Sammich…” Gabriel took a deep, labored, and obviously painful breath. “Yes. Please help me with this, I can’t do it on my own.”

Sam nodded before taking one of Gabriel’s hands gingerly and leading him to the bathroom.

“Can you take off your shirt?” he requested gently.

“I don’t think so. Can you help me?”

Sam nodded again and carefully pulled Gabriel’s shirt off over his head. What he saw underneath it intensified both his horror at the situation and his rage and loathing for Gabriel’s family members.

“What is all of this?”

Gabriel’s torso was covered in horizontal and diagonal scars in various stages of healing. Some were simply white lines, and others were freshly scabbed over. Four of them, however, were openly gushing, oozing pus and blood.

“Luci has a… a knife, and sometimes when he gets really angry, he sort of explodes. He usually makes an example of me to keep my brothers in line. I guess these ones opened up again from the stress of-of running away.”

He sounded like he was seconds away from tears. Sam could relate, but he needed to keep his shit together for Gabriel’s sake, so that he didn’t realize Sam was as scared as he was.

“You said you wanted a bath, right? I’ll help you clean these and then we’ll bandage them, unless you’d rather I leave. You can always change your mind.”

“No!” Gabriel almost shouted, immediately looked ashamed and guilty. “I don’t want you to leave. I don’t want to be alone.”

Sam nodded. “Okay. I’ll draw up the bath, you can focus on taking the rest of your clothes off and not hurting yourself any more than you already are, yeah?”

Gabriel made an assenting noise and Sam looked away from him so that he could turn on the tap.

By the time he turned back, Gabriel Novak was naked in his bathroom. And holy shit, under any other circumstances he would be relishing in this but he couldn’t, not in this situation, not without feeling like one sick and fucked-up bastard. He jerked his head in the direction of the hot water stagnating in the bathtub, and Gabriel took a deep breath before easing himself into it.

“This is gonna hurt, so be ready. I’m really sorry in advance,” he told the blond. He just nodded, so Sam proceeded to lather his hands in soap.

He started with Gabriel’s shoulders, because the ones on his shoulders were all healed and closed up, and worked his way slowly down his friend’s back, kneading the kinks out of his muscles and leaving soapy trails along his body.

Finally he made it to one of the bigger gashes. “Are you okay?” he asked. Gabriel had his eyes squeezed tightly shut but he nodded, so Sam started to clean the wound with his hands. Gabriel flinched and hissed but didn’t tell him to stop.

Once he was done, he asked again. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Gabriel replied with much effort. “I’m good. Keep going.”

“I’m sorry this hurts so much,” Sam said to distract him from the pain as he cleaned the next open wound. “These ones that opened again are all infected and so I need to clean them very thoroughly before I can bandage them.”

“When did you learn First Aid, Samsquatch?” Gabriel asked, eyelids still pressed together.

“Took a class,” Sam replied, moving on to the next. The talking seemed to help, so he kept doing it. “I have a certification in First Aid, although I need to get it renewed pretty soon.”

“Not inspiring a ton of confidence,” Gabriel joked, but it landed like a lead balloon.

“I swear I know what I’m doing,” Sam told him, moving his hands to the final wound. “If I thought that I couldn’t help you, I would call 911.”

“NO!” Gabriel actually shouted this time. “Please, you can’t call the police, please.”

Sam was stunned for a moment, but then he nodded. “Okay,” he conceded. “I won’t say anything to the authorities if you don’t want me to. I mostly just meant that I would have asked for an ambulance or taken you to the ER if I thought I couldn’t treat you sufficiently.”

Gabriel was nodding pretty consistently, but Sam pulled his hands away and said, “you’re done! Lay back, we’ll wash the soap out now.”

Gabriel did as he was asked, and then Sam handed him a towel and made as if to leave. “Sam,” Gabriel pleaded in what amounted to a strangled whisper. “Please, stay.”

“Okay,” Sam replied, more readily this time. Gabriel was surprising him left and right today, but he was getting better at anticipating it.

He made a point of not watching as Gabriel carefully toweled himself dry and then wrapped the towel low on his waist and sat on the closed toilet lid to let Sam bandage him up.

“I’m all ready, doctor,” he quipped, and thankfully that time it actually lightened the air a little bit.

“Okay then, Mr. Novak,” Sam replied, grabbing the First Aid kit. “I’m just gonna wrap both of your triceps and then these two on your back which are going to be trickier. You might need to take a couple of days off from school to let those ones heal, because it’s going to be hard to move or breathe in these bandages.”

Gabriel sighed dramatically. “I don’t know what I’ll ever do.”

“I’ll stay with you, if you want.”

“No, it’s okay, Samster. You love school, and you love your law degree, and I don’t want to take that from you over some stupid-”

“I’m gonna stop you right there. This isn’t ‘stupid’. This is your physical health. This is ‘my best friend is literally _gushing_ blood and I’m not going to be able to function in my classes anyway because I’ll be so busy worrying about him’. I would rather stay here with you than go to school.”

Gabriel looked taken aback and strangely touched. “Okay,” he breathed after a very long moment. “Okay.”

Sam finished bandaging his body in silence, and it was an oddly tense silence, different than usual. They, more often than not, didn’t really feel the need to fill the space with conversation if they had nothing to talk about. They would just sit together in comfortable silence.

This silence was something different entirely.

Once Sam was done, he cleared his throat. “Mkay, so I’m going to go make myself dinner. Are you good?”

“Yeah,” Gabriel replied. Sam looked at him awkwardly for a second, then sighed inaudibly and went into the kitchen to make himself a sandwich. When he finished eating it, Gabriel was sitting on his couch, looking down at his hands. His shirt had been replaced, thank God, because if Sam had had to keep looking at his shirtless best friend, he might have had a spontaneous aneurysm.

“Thank you for doing all this for me,” Gabriel whispered without looking up at him. “I know that I’m not worth it and I can’t really give you anything back but I’m so, so grateful that you care about me. You’re about the only person who does.”

Sam sat down next to him on the couch but didn’t speak for a while. Finally, he just said, “god_dammit _Gabe,” and gently pulled his best friend into a hug.

“What?” Gabriel asked as Sam cried quietly into his shirt.

"Your brother is a great big bag of dicks," Sam muttered. 

"Tell me about it," Gabriel agreed. Sam sighed heavily and buried his face deeper into Gabe's shoulder. 

“I hate this. I hate them for doing this to you. I swear to god I want them dead, I want them all dead,” he murmured hysterically. “I don’t know how anyone could let this happen to you. I will never let this happen to you again, do you understand? _Never_.”

“Sambo, it’s really okay-”

“It’s really not!” Sam yelled, pulling away from Gabriel and dabbing at his eyes. “It’s so, so not okay. I’m so fucking angry that Michael and Lucifer did this to you, I’m so angry. It’s not okay. It’s not okay because I fucking love you, Gabe, and I want to protect you and I want you to be okay all the time, alright? Just be okay, for me, please.” At some point he had stood up and started pacing the room, but he didn’t remember when.

Gabriel looked like there were eight hundred feeling conflicting inside him at that. His face was flickering between them at a rapid pace, but finally, he replied, “I love you, Sam.”

Sam stopped in his tracks. “You- you do?”

“Yeah,” Gabriel muttered. “Of course I do, you dumb-ass moose.”

Sam sat down next to him again. “I love you too.”

“I know you do. You said that.”

Sam swallowed. “Can I kiss you? Is that okay right now, or would you rather I stay away?”

Instead of answering, Gabriel just leaned forward and caught Sam’s stupid mouth with his own. He tasted like sugar and dopamine, and it was the happiest Sam could ever remember being.


End file.
